F. Lafond

The Yule-Simon distribution describes the diffusion of knowledge and ideas in a social network which in turn influences economic growth.

Suppose that homogenous agents fully consume their time to invent new ideas and learn ideas from
their friends. If the social network is complete and agents pick friends and ideas of friends uniformly
at random, the distribution of ideas’ popularity is an extension of the Yule–Simon distribution. It
has a power-law tail, with an upward or downward curvature. For infinite population it converges
to the Yule–Simon distribution. The power law is steeper when innovation is high. Diffusion follows
logistic curves.

Self-organization of knowledge economies